Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke
(C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain(Glass
Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he
was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University.

Ariel Francisco is
a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is
currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is
the editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner
of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are
forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and
elsewhere.

__________

I've never met Ariel Francisco. When poet
friend, Kate Fadick's chapbook, Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen, became available for preorder from Glass
Poetry Press, I learned that Editor Anthony Frame was offering a purchase deal
on all the chapbooks he would publish in the first series, so I subscribed, and
discovered Francisco's poetry in that series.—Karen L. George

One of the qualities I
especially enjoy about chapbooks vs. poetry collections is that chapbooks,
especially one as exquisite as yours, are so effective in creating a cohesive work,
a concentration that resonates in each poem and in the poems as a whole. Every
time I read your chapbook, I notice more connections or threads woven through
it by the use of repeated imagery and themes that deepen and illuminate your
work. What do you like and/or dislike about this short poetry form?

AF:That’s actually
really interesting because I was working on my thesis (which turned into my
forthcoming full length collection, All
My Heroes Are Broke) when I was approached about publishing a chapbook. I
had another project I was working on which was about chapbook length, but
ultimately decided to construct something from the poems in my thesis instead.
So while I didn’t write it as a chapbook, or with a chapbook in mind, I had a
lot to work with which presented ample opportunities to create connects and
threads throughout. It was difficult but also a lot of fun, essentially paring
60 pages of poems down to 20, and then trying to figure out an order. I think I
decided on the title first, for example, so that set the opening poem and
closing poem in place, and I just worked my way inwards from there.

What I love about chapbooks is their ability to create and
sustain these threads throughout the poems, whatever they may be. I don’t want
to say it’s easier to do in chapbook than a full length book because I don’t
want to diminish it, but it does make more sense to do that in a smaller space.
I think that’s part of the reason why chapbooks are becoming more popular. It’s
a slightly different medium where one can accomplish something different, and
there are a lot of talented poets out there publishing very cool, very strange,
and very beautiful chapbooks.

In your poems you
mention the poets Baudelaire, Bukowski, Lorca, and James Wright. Are these some
of your favorite poets, or ones that particularly influenced you, and if so, can you tell us what you particularly admire about them?
Or if these are not favorite poets of yours, what are some of your favorite or
most influential poets, and why?

AF:They’re poets
that I’ve read pretty well at different points in my life. Of those, James Wright
has had the biggest influence on me, even for the style of these kinds of
poems— engaging with them directly instead of just writing a poem in their
style, or after them, which seems more common. I’m thinking, for example, of
Wright’s “As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter,
I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor,” which alludes to Po Chu-I (another
poet I really love). I also got this from Campbell McGrath, one of my teachers
and mentors, who is always bringing in poets of the past into in his own poems
whether it's James Wright or Richard Hugo or Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara. I
think seeing it in his work sort of gave me permission to do it in my own, and
it’s a lot of fun. Not to mention it gave me more poets to look up and read
when I was younger. Reading Campbell’s “James Wright, Richard Hugo, the
Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest” was the first time I had heard of
those two poets, for example.

Also, a lot of it is
just true, and I often use that as a jumping off point for poems. Where it
takes me is another story but I did find that Baudelaire book and mail it to
someone that never got it, and I was reading James Wright on the L when that
dude started throwing up on himself.

What drew you to
poetry?What inspires you to write
poetry?

AF:I didn’t start
writing poetry until I started college. I’d been reading incessantly since I
learned how to read, though I never read poetry until my senior year of high
school. In AP English, I remember hating
T.S. Eliot but really enjoying Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and that was
pretty much it. Going into college, I knew that being just a reader wasn’t a
real thing, so I figured writing was the logical progression. Though I’d mostly
read fiction and novels, I had no interest in writing it, at all. It seemed
strange at the time, but I found absolutely no correlation between reading
fiction and wanting to write it, whereas reading even just that little bit of
poetry (most of it being The Waste Land,
which again, I hated) seemed to just make more sense to me, I think because it
struck me more as a sense-making endeavor. I could obviously understand why
people read novels but I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to write one, whereas poetry right away
made sense from both angles.

I remember before taking an Intro to Creative Writing
course in my first semester of college, I went to Barnes and Noble to check out
the poetry section (I guess even then, I knew I had to read more poetry in
order to ever get good at it) to see if I could something that would interest
me. First, I found Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (the affordable B&C
classics version, which I still love). Then, in a moment of befuddlement and
sheer job, I found Plath’s Ariel
which I had no idea existed. Imagining thinking “I’ll give this poetry thing a
try” and then finding your own name on a book by one of only three poets you’ve
read. I took this as a good omen and signed up for a workshop almost every
semester in undergrad, and just kept writing, which was great because I had
failed chemistry and college algebra in my first semester, and switched my
major from Marine Biology to English (long story).

What inspires me to write poetry is just the desire to
make sense of my life, which I think is the source of a lot of art. It’s as
reflective and analytical as it is creative for me, so when I get it right I
feel like I have created something and solved something else.

I wanted to ask you about the poem “Perhaps it
Wasn’t Such a Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger’s story that is referenced
in the epigraph is so haunting, and I found your poem haunting as well. The
ending image stuck with me, of the “I” of the poem searching the hotel windows,
“ears perked / for the sound of a muffled gunshot.” But I was equally struck by
the image near the center of the poem, where, after seeing this man at the
beach who “stands in the foam staring at his feet, / hiding his toes in the
cold froth,” you say, “I lay Salinger’s / ‘Nine Stories’ in the bird-pocked
sand.” The poem doesn’t spell out what the story of the man standing in the
ocean might be, or of the other person in the poem who is reading Salinger’s
“Nine Stories.” Yet they’re connected by being in the same place at this exact
moment. And by how the man standing in the ocean suggests the male character in
Salinger’s story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which is a story in the
collection “Nine Stories.” The “muffled gunshot” in the poem also echoes the
ending of Salinger’s story, where the troubled man leaves the beach, goes into
his hotel room and shoots himself.

But I’m curious about why
the “I” of the poem lays the story collection “in the bird-pocked sand.” We
don’t know if he lays it there temporarily, or is, as it were “done” with the
book, himself haunted by the story. I had the curious idea that maybe the
“reader” I’ll call him/her, thinks this man on the beach is troubled in some
way, and that maybe this book of stories is just what he might need. I’m
curious what you meant to suggest by his laying of the book in the sand. It’s
such an evocative image, as is the effect of the scene of this beach mirroring
the scene in Salinger’s story.

AF:This is a
really great question and I feel bad that I can’t give a very long answer to
it. On the one hand, I think he’s putting the book down to reflect. Given the
setting of the story, I think he is perhaps imagining that he is on the very
same beach that Seymour killed himself on and is maybe revisiting the story in
his head, imposing it on his current surroundings. I think he sees the man
hiding his toes in the water, that’s for the reader (also hopefully reminiscent
of Seymour accusing the woman in the elevator of staring at his toes). I like
the idea of the reader thinking the book might help this troubled man but the
“I” is too lost in thought to notice him, unfortunately.

In your 2014 “Gulf Stream
Literary Magazine” interview with Tony Hoagland, he says at one point in the
conversation, “Poems are like clues that have been left for us along the road,
little packages that have been left which anybody might find.You might read a poem, like I did, by W.S.
Merwin, many years ago and say, ‘this man knows what I’ve been looking for, and
he’s saying what I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me.’ Our contemporary
poems have the obligation to do that too.”

Do you agree with
Hoagland’s idea, and what do you envision or hope your poems tell its readers?

AF:Oh yeah, I
definitely agree with Tony there. I mean, I think that’s just a fun way of
explaining why we love poems so much. When you read a poem that really
resonates with you, it truly does feel as though the poet has some kind of
secret insight into your life. How could
they know this is exactly how I feel? Right? But it also acknowledges the
extreme subjectability of poetry. There could a poem out there that everyone is
raving about, but you don’t find it to be particularly good or interesting or
resonant. It could be that that poem is not a clue for you.

What I hope for my poems, in the hands and eyes of
readers, is to create a space or atmosphere for the mind to occupy. I think of
them as tiny episodes of a very weird show— the episodes cumulate not necessarily
into a cohesive story but into a larger space. I’m not sure if that makes sense
but I hope people keep watching.

I read that you are the
editor-in-chief of “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine,” and a reader for “The
Indianola Review.” What are some of the elements you look for in submissions,
that make a poem memorable for you?

AF:Speaking
broadly, my favorite kinds of poems are those that seem to communicate a
genuine human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something true. I
know the speaker or the “I” in a poem isn’t always the poet, but I want to
believe or be convinced that it is. I want to believe that when reading a poem,
the person speaking to me is an actual person telling me something that’s very
important to them. Why is this thing important? Maybe I’m not sure, but if I
believe that it is, I will reread it for reasons.

What poets and/or
collections are you currently reading, and can you tell us what you
particularly like about them?

AF:Oh, too many to name! I’ve been revisiting
Phil Levine, though mostly his collected interviews and essays and various
prose things. His work occupies a real world that I recognize very well (the
working class struggle, etc.), so I’m always coming back to him in some way or
another. Similarly, Adrian Matejka’s new “Map of the Stars” is a book I’ve been
really loving this summer. He seems to dip into memory a lot in this book with
poems about childhood, whether it’s wonder and curiosity (I too was obsessed with
space as a kid) or the struggles of growing up poor, of feeling out of place in
the place you call home. That’s always going to resonate with me.

I understand you have a forthcoming
poetry collection called “All My Heroes Are Broke” that can be pre-ordered now, and
released by C&R Press in September.Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about this new book?

AF:The book has
epigraph from the rap group Atmosphere, which I think sums it up pretty well:
“I ain’t saying that you never had to struggle for a buck or some luck or some
love, motherfucker join the club.” The poems are essentially about a life in
search of these three things (hence being broke, in more than one sense), not
necessarily finding them, and not necessarily giving up. Briefly, it’s about
being a first generation American and finding that everything kinda sucks.

Do you have any
new projects you are currently at work on?

AF:I’m grinding
away at my second book, and I have poems towards a third and a fourth (they
don’t make sense together). I’m translating some of my dad's poems into
English, which is a really interesting experience. I’m also maybe working on a
chapbook of poems inspired by Cowboy Bebop. And, of course, I am looking for a
job.

Ariel Francisco is the author of All My
Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain(Glass
Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he
was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University.

Ariel Francisco is a first
generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is currently
completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is the
editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner of
an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming
in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere.

__________

I've
never met Ariel Francisco. When poet friend,
Kate Fadick's chapbook, Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen, became available for preorder from Glass
Poetry Press, I learned that Editor Anthony Frame was offering a purchase deal
on all the chapbooks he would publish in the first series, so I subscribed, and
discovered Francisco's poetry in that Glass Poetry series.—Karen
L. George You can read an interview with Ariel Francisco here.

__________

Review of Ariel
Francisco's Before Snowfall, After Rain

The poems of Ariel Francisco's Before Snowfall, After Rain are poems of
place: New York, Miami, historic landmarks, bars, bridges, rivers, lakes. They
are poems of motion and journeys in cars, buses, trains, planes, and boats, as
well as metaphorical journeys. And they are meditations on memory and
imagination, being lost and found, having a home and being homeless, connection
and disconnection, of all the yearning and fragility involved in being human.

The
chapbook's title, Before Snowfall, After
Rain, is taken from the title of the first poem, "Before
Snowfall" and the last poem, "Self Portrait with Moths After
Rain," which leans us toward one of the repeated images that works
thematically throughout this book—that of transition and transformation—of the
periods before and after.

The
poem "Before Snowfall" begins with an epigraph by poet Jack Gilbert,
"French has no word for home,"
which introduces us to several other repeated themes of the book—the importance
of home and/or place and connection. The poem takes place near Washington
Square Park, a public meeting place in New York, where the poem's narrator buys
what he describes as an "orphaned book" of Baudelaire. The first line
"I found Baudelaire on a street corner," sets up the contrast between
the images of lost and found repeated throughout the book. The
narrator mails the book to a "girl back home," but "She never
got the book...and we never spoke again." He figures it must have gotten
"lost in the dead letter office." But the narrator says that every
year he imagines a homeless man rummaged through the mail box and found the
book and his note saying "tell me,
is the snow coming down / on you too?" The poem ends as follows:

...And
I imagine him looking up,

his
gaze tracing the skyline until it reaches

the
grey horizon, thinking of all the nowheres

to
go to lay his head down tonight,

saying
out loud:

Not yet my friend. Thank goodness,

not yet.

There is such tenderness in this
imagined connection between the poem's narrator and the imagined homeless man,
as well as a sense of sadness and longing in the lost connection to the friend
back home, and how the narrator also says that the lost book reminds him every
year "of what is lost." That simple phrase "what is lost"
contains a powerful, haunting emotional impact.

In the second poem, "A View of
the Statue of Liberty from the Brooklyn Bridge," the narrator talks about
the bridge being filled with lovers' locks "inscribed with names in marker
or lipstick." He continues:

Their
keys sunken to the bottom of the East River,

combinations
lost in the brackish waters of memory.

The above image contrasts the image
of the lovers connected via these locks. The phrase "combinations lost"
suggests that the lovers may no longer be lovers, same as the way he describes
the bridge as "already heavy with rust." The poem ends with the
narrator seeing the Statue of Liberty as "a dream-sized woman standing / ...arm
raised to hail a cab that will never come." Again, an intense sense of
longing is created through the poem's imagery.

One of the things I like best about
Francisco's chapbook is the way each poem works on its own, and yet is part of
a connected network of repeated imagery and ideas.For example the third poem, "Reading
Lorca at Union Square," references another French poet, Lorca, and "a
man in a black trenchcoat," same as the way he described the seller of the
locks in the previous poem. And same as the Statue of Liberty in the previous
poem looks as if she is hailing a cab, this trenchcoat man is literally hailing
a cab.Snowflakes occur again in this
poem. Water in all its forms (snow, ice, frost, rain, flood) appear in this
chapbook, emphasizing the repeated themes of transition and transformation. The
poem ends with the following stunning lines describing the man in the black
trenchcoat:

...snowflakes
settling into his

slick
back hair like nesting sparrows

seeking
safety, the sky crying its apologies.

This beautiful image of the
"nesting sparrows / seeking safety" echoes the homeless man in the
first poem. The sense of yearning in this poem is further strengthened in the
repeated vowel sounds in the last line above.

The
poem "Nighthawks of the 24-Hour Donut Shops" continues with the idea
of people lost and/or alone in one way or another—those who need shelter. The
"Nighthawks" in the poem's title references Edward Hopper's
1942 painting titled "Nighthawks," that depicts people in a similar
diner.Francisco describes the donut
shop's patrons as "wanderers/ looking to escape the cold, or thrown-out /
drunks trying to keep the night-talk alive."

Literary
references are another motif that connects these poems. In "Jay Gatsby on
Karaoke Night," there is a drunk man who "sits in the corner of a
windowless bar" who keeps calling the bartender "old sport" and
who, when he gets on stage, only sings the song's "bridge over
and over again...There is a light that
never goes out," which alludes to the green light that Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby sees at the end of
Daisy's dock. That green light represented the hope of Daisy that Jay doesn't
want to give up, and the reader gets the idea that the Jay Gatsby of this poem
has an unrealized dream he likewise refuses to give up, to his own detriment.
That image of a light that never goes out also echoes the previous poem's
"red blazing 'O' in the window, a beacon" of the 24-hour donut shop.

The poem "Meditation on Happiness" uses the
image of a joyful bus driver at the end of the day, done with his shift,
"his display / glowing a single gleeful / orange word: GARAGE."This glowing word represents hope and
happiness that the other poems touch on, in much the same way as the "red
blazing 'O' in the window of the 24-houer donut shop, and the song about the "light that never goes out."This poem also contains a repeated image of
motion, transportation, and journeys that speaks to the course of our lives as
humans.

In
"Reading James Wright on the L Train" the narrator tells of a
stranger vomiting on the crowded train.The narrator had been reading the poetry of James Wright to himself, but
he tells us he walks to the other end of the car, to a "now vacant
bench," and "Beneath a sun-marred window blossoming / with jewels of
frost, I begin to read aloud."The
other passengers retreat to adjacent compartments, covering their noses with
scarves. But apparently the narrator is still in the same compartment, and
there is such tenderness and compassion in the image of him reading aloud, as
if trying to offer whatever comfort he has, even if at a distance, to the sick man.The narrator doesn't judge that man or even
suggest whether the man's drunk or motion-sick. As a fellow poet and lover of
James Wright's poetry, I can't help but be nourished by this image of a train
rider reading Wright's poetry aloud. The poem is also strengthened by the
effective contrast between the man being sick and the beautiful image of the
window "blossoming with jewels of frost"—another image of
transformation.

The poem "Silence over the Snowy Fields" with
an epigraph "for Robert Bly,"
references Bly's collection of poems titled Silence
in the Snowy Fields.The poem takes
place on an airplane as the narrator looks out the window.He tells us:"a harbor / bites into the mainland like a great blue dragon,"
and continues:

Heavy
whiteness douses the landscape, forces

it to
forget what it looks like, what it is, like

a mind that
fails to recognize itself...

Echoing previous poems, again we have this image of snow
as transformation and/or change: "the echoing nothingness of
erasure," as well as a sense of loss as is seen in the images of the above
three lines.

There is a longer poem (over 3 pages) at the center of
the chapbook, titled "Driving Past Lake Tohopekaliga," in which the
narrator visits his father who still lives in Florida near the lake in the
poem's title. The narrator delves into memories of riding with his father
driving the car, and stopping to move turtles safely across the road so they
wouldn't get hit. The poem begins with a dreamy, lyrical line: "Tilted
trees suffer dusk" that is perfect to lead us into this poem of
reminiscence. He describes the species of turtles in the following lines:

alligator
snappers with their giant

beartrap
jaws and huge heads,

too big
to withdraw into their shells;

map
turtles whose namesake comes

from
markings along their bodies

that
resemble contour lines;

red-ear
sliders, named for the woundlike

markings
on their faces,

streaks
of feverish evening light.

The poem reveals that this time of moving the turtles
"was so many years ago, / before the divorce, before my family / entered
the new millennium in splinters." The narrator says his dad "still
lives in the same house we left." This image of leaving the home he grew
up in, before the divorce, echoes the themes of having a home vs. being
homeless or lost, as well as the repeated images of connection and disconnection.
The idea of life's changes and transformations also reappears in this poem, as
seen in the following lines about rescue and release:

There's
a buddhist ritual

that
involves buying turtles

at food
markets, turtles destined

for
soup, and setting them free—

an unselfish act meant

to
accrue good karma,

The narrator goes on to reveal what he doesn't know about
his father, creating a sense of questioning and intense yearning, perhaps for a
time when he still lived with his father, or a desire to be more deeply
connected to his father:

I don't
think he knows

about the
ritual. I don't know

that he
thinks much about karma,

I don't
know if he knows

the name
of the lake just south

of his
home is Tohopekaliga,

which is a word in a language

older
than any turtle he's ever found

and
returned safely to that shore,

a word
that translates

to
something like a promise:

we will gather here together.

The fact that the poet places this poem at the time of
dusk also reinforces the idea of change and transition.

The poem "Reading Bukowski at Gramps Bar"
speaks to connections between strangers and the fragility and vulnerability of
human beings. There is such yearning in the haunting ending, where he says
there is a blonde "eyeing" him "with her bluebird eyes,"
and continues:

and I'm
tempted to smash the little lamp

over my
own head, scoop up the glass

pieces in
quivering hands, and offer

them to
her as the shards of my heart.

In the above lines, the lamp again echoes the many images
of light threaded through these poems.

"Post Hurricane Miami" opens with a striking
image of vulnerability and fragility in a violent world, in which the city has
been reduced to shapes and sounds, such as "wind chimes hanging from the
doorframe, / silent now in the aftermath like the hollow / bones of birds they
so resemble." The streets are flooded, power lines downed, and transformers
ruptured, yet the narrator presents hope through the image of light:

Even
dead stars give us their light.

One
twinkles occasionally and I recall

looking
up at the sky through the window

of my
childhood room, catching the shimmer

and
making a wish...

The poem ends with the narrator seeing another kind of
light, candles lit in a fortune teller's window, and he makes a connection with
a stranger, wanting his fortune read, even if he has nothing to pay.

The poem "American Night, American Morning" opens
with the narrator's insomnia, and an image of connection:

When I
can't sleep I go

up to
the rooftop

of my
apartment building

and
watch the man who sleeps

on the
bus stop bench

across
the street, brown by birth

or sun.
I want to ask him

How do you do it?

The ending poem, "Self Portrait with Moths After
Rain," contains the "After Rain" part of the chapbook's title,
creating a satisfying sense of having come full circle, of completing the ideas
and images examined throughout.The poem
is only three lines:

Moths
stumble through dusk, descending

towards
the glow of a glimmering lamppost

mirrored
in the water of a rain-filled pothole.

Again the
poem takes place at dusk, a time of transition and transformation. The narrator
speaks of the change that has taken place because of the rain, echoing the
various states of water seen in many of the previous poems. What a beautiful
image of contrast, likeness, and hope in the image of the lamppost reflected in
the water of a "rain-filled pothole." The narrator suggests with the
poem's title that he, like the moths, stumbles through times of change and
darkness, but that he is descending
towards the light—an intriguing dual image, because we normally think of ascending towards the light, as represented by the "glimmering
lamppost," but in this instance, the moths are heading for the mirror
image in the water, rather than the actual lamppost. I saw this poem as a
closing mediation on the dualities of life.

The
poems in Ariel Francisco's Before Snowfall,
After Rain pull me in with their emotional intensity and haunting imagery.
They pulse with the tensions and rhythms of our lives as humans: how we change
and stay the same, how we connect and disconnect, how we hope and despair. Franciso's
attention to detail and his sense of intimacy, compassion, reverence and
vulnerability make these poems ones you'll come back to again and again.

What Happens Here?

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